— Eric McWilliams 2025/05/15 20:10

I started my dokuwiki adventures like 2 or 3 weeks ago hosting things in some shared space at Dreamhost. I prefer having my instance on a shared host and not hosting this myself. The server/webserver/php setup alone can get pretty demanding on my personal time although these days it was pretty much “Spin up Debian VM, configure initial server, install Apache and php, then download and tar the dokuwiki packaged from their download page. The real headache comes in setting dokuwiki server permissions and not granting to much access to the rest of the world. I am still not 100% sure I did it right and wouldn't be surprised if some bot finds this instance and spams the hell out of the backend.

Well as I started adding plugins for dokuwiki I got to the point of loading a plugin I loved, and used years ago called Graphviz. Graphviz is open-source graph visualization software and includes a language called dot built by AT&T Labs this whole package was used to automate large network/telco drawings. On the shared hosting provider, the plugin constantly broke for me. I wracked my brain out for a day or two and it dawned on me that the hosting provider probably wouldn't allow a web/php script to call back and run an executable without some special permissions. I spent another day trying to figure out a work around with no luck.

Just to test my theory I spun up another self-contained VM at Digital Ocean another cloud provider/ISP I have been using for years now. After configuring the server and packages I loaded up the dokuwiki plugins with Graphviz and gave it a test and YES it works now!